Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of electronic activities, due to widespread use of smartphone, tablet computers, laptop computers, transaction terminals, and electronic computing devices in general which are configured for accepting authentication credentials in electronic form. Typically, in conventional systems one or more authentication credentials are provided at the time of initiation of a user activity. These credentials are then transmitted to external systems for validation using a single communication channel. However, the credentials may be intercepted or accessed by unauthorized entities during transmission via the single communication channel which may then be utilized for future unauthorized user activities without the permission of the user. Moreover, because only a set of one or more credentials, which typically do not change for one user activity to another, are required to be validated for performing the user activity at a point in time, the veracity of the source/provider of credentials cannot be ascertained in conventional systems. Particularly, conventional systems are unable to provide secure authorization because the systems cannot effectively distinguish if the authentication credentials at the time of the user activity are provided by the user or by unauthorized entities.
The present invention provides a novel solution to the foregoing shortcomings of conventional systems and provides improvements to technology by employing continuum of elastic authentication tokens that are typically captured during an extended time period prior to and independent of initiation of a user activity. The previous discussion of the background to the invention is provided for illustrative purposes only and is not an acknowledgement or admission that any of the material referred to is or was part of the common general knowledge as at the priority date of the application.